A former electrician who worked for Pablo Picasso before his death has gone on trial with his wife accused of stealing 271 works by the artist.
Pierre Le Guennec, now in his 70s and retired, says the world-famous artist and his wife Jacqueline gave him the oil canvases, drawings and Cubist collages when he was doing work on the last property they lived in before the artist died in 1973.
But some of Picasso's family members, including his son Claude, dispute this and filed a complaint against the couple, who were charged in 2011.
Le Guennec is standing trial in the southeastern city of Grasse with his wife Danielle.
Claude, who runs the Picasso Administration which authenticates the Spanish art legend's works of art, is one of the plaintiffs in the case.
Others include Paloma, Claude's sister, another child Maya, two grandchildren and Catherine Hutin-Blay, the daughter of Picasso's last wife Jacqueline.
Le Guennec claims that when he was working on Picasso's home in Mougins, an upmarket town in the hills outside Cannes on the French Riviera, the artist often invited him to have some cake and drink coffee.
"We talked about everything and nothing," he told AFP in 2010.
"One evening when I left work, Madame gave me a small packet and said 'this is for you'," he said.
"When I came home, I saw sketches, pencil drawings. I didn't know anything about all this. If Madame had given me a painting, then that would have been weird."
He put the present in his garage, but when he went to Paris in 2010 to get the works authenticated at the Picasso Administration, the artist's heirs filed an official complaint.
"They don't remember a thing, whether they received this gift in 1970, 1971, 1972," said Jean-Jacques Neuer, Claude Picasso's lawyer.
"If someone gives you 271 Picasso works, you remember that."
The works were all created between 1900 and 1932.
"You would have to imagine Picasso keeping them for 70 years and all of a sudden wanting to give them away," Mr Neuer said.
The couple's lawyer Charles-Etienne Gudin, meanwhile, said there were only a dozen works of value and that the rest was "very mediocre," insisting that Picasso never tried to sell them.
They face up to five years in prison and a €375,000 fine if convicted for concealing stolen goods.
The trial, which is likely to be closely scrutinised by the art world, is expected to last three days.
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